Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

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Where are these horrible places that people work and hang out? I’ve worked at places as small as a tiny ISP where I was basically the only tech employee, startups with a dozen employees to companies as large as HP and everything in between. I’ve worked on the east coast and west coast. I’ve worked for private companies and public ones. Ive been on small teams and large. Ive had dozens of managers. I’ve been an SA and a programmer and sometimes the jack of all trades who’s responsible for IT and the web farm. I’ve racked and stacked gear. I’ve punched down Ethernet. I’ve got a CS degree from a state school. I’ve coded in Basic, assembly, C, C++, scheme, Perl 4 and 5, python 1, 2 and 3, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Shell, TCL, Pascal, Fortran, Lua, and on and on. I’ve contributed to open source small (chpasswd) and large (Apache, git).

I don’t ever recall running into someone who would treat me badly based on what I do. I’m not arguing it doesn’t exist. I certainly believe the author. I just haven’t experienced it myself. Have I just been lucky?

I haven't experienced this personally either. What I have noticed is the following:

- Signaling in tech is a real thing. I believe this stems from being (understandably) picky about our peers, combined with a fundamental difficulty of evaluating them. The problem is complex enough that our strong tendency is to fall back on stereotyping and other heuristics.

- Many programmers (myself included) have had encounters with "Web developers" whose primary interaction with JS is copying and pasting. Of course, it's hard to say what percentage of "Web developers" fall into this category -- certainly it's just a small proportion of the whole -- but enough of this type exist that "Web developer" is not always a positive signal -- indeed, it can be negative for some people.

- The above issue appears to be self-reinforcing, because the more the tech culture becomes aware of the problem, the more the stigma grows for existing Web developers that have not changed their title. Posts like the OP's are valuable because they work to correct our cultural narrative.

I'd expect the most likely people to experience this are "Web developers" who haven't yet accrued enough other signals of their competency (like experience, charisma, or similarity with their peers). e.g. a soft-spoken female Web developer without a lot of experience sounds like an archetype where this could be an issue.

Of course, it's a game of chance. But the odds are incredibly different for each person.

I think the author was exaggerating a bit, or perhaps is more sensitive to other peoples' opinions than most (e.g. the bit about crying in the bathroom). In the past I have definitely worked at companies where "web developer" was a completely different job title than "software engineer" (back-end developer), and paid less money. Definitely second-class citizens. The industry seems to have turned a corner with the advent of single page app frameworks, npm, etc, and everyone these days seems to be "full stack", but I'm sure there are still plenty of companies out there still doing it this way.

Also, from what I can tell people in academia and certain open source circles are brutal to each other (e.g. Linus Torvalds). I'm sure they would shit on the work I do every day... but I'm too busy to care.

Weird (to me). I don’t care what a coworker makes or what their title is. I don’t even care what my own title is. When a former employer let me choose the title for my business card I went with “problem solver.” All I really care about is having competent coworkers with integrity who are respectful to each other. It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It’s not my job to judge the value of a coworker’s work.

It most certainly is, when you have to work with and clean up the mess.

Much like there is the notion of "10x" programmers, there are also "-10x" ones. Unfortunately they can stay around for a surprisingly long time.

What I was trying to say by “value” is that it’s not my job to determine the worth of a particular position to a company. i.e. it’s above my pay grade to decide what a web developer is worth vs a backend engineer, etc.

Judging the quality of someone’s work _may_ be my job if I’m asked for peer feedback, but even there I disagree. I feel it should be up to a manager to determine whether his or her reports are doing good work. (I’m not a fan of peer feedback for a variety of reasons.)

Of course if someone is incompetent, that’s a different matter. How I’d deal with that is too circumstance specific to outline here. I’ve been fortunate in that I can only recall a few such people.

Shouldn't everyone be judging (and improving) the quality of everyone's work in a team, if you want the project to succeed ? How is a manager to judge the quality of technical output other than peer feedback ?

Sure, code reviews, architectural review, etc. First line managers should be technical enough to know whether their reports are doing a good job.

You've either been lucky or oblivious. My experience with office people has been that any minuscule thing that can be used to alpha-dog somebody, will be used to alpha-dog somebody.

I suspect it's because the mothership goes out of its way to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and confusion--open offices, stack ranking, endless meetings, etc...

It is easier to assert your dominance over them when they are at each others' throats.

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